This is the second session of a Saturday parenting conference with Adam Young and Dan Allender. This is session #2.
Session #2: What Gets in the Way? Dan Allender
Parenting is a gift of giving our children a taste of who God is. (Psalm 63)
The very nature of delight comes from love. It comes from a heart that wants to bring goodness. We want to bring goodness to our children. We want them to know something of the goodness of the love of God. The Love of God is tender and full of delight. We are meant to be a taste of the presence of God through the way we love our children.
Your children need the presence of your STRENGTH. Discipline is where we give our children a taste of strength. That strength is the discipline of the capacity to help them co-regulate. How can we offer something to our children that we refuse to offer to ourselves?
Is their mutuality and delight in your core relationships? Let's really focus on CORE RELATIONSHIPS as we listen today.
Book suggestion: How Children Raise Parents
The child plays such a part of our facing our own story like no other relationship.
Please remember: There is always the potentional for redemption. And it begins with YOU -- not with them.
Core things to discuss:
1. Most marriages get in the way of good parenting. The differences between you and your spouse show up in the way you parent. You are going to come into parenting in different ways. By the age of 4 a child can read your face and know when you are not telling the truth. By age 4, they can even articulate the motives behind your deceit. They are reading your marriage. They are reading the tensions. They are reading when you need them to fill your emptiness because you feel so lonely with your spouse. Make sure you adequately engage the relationships that are central in your life. Where we grow as a parent is with our spouse, friends, therapist, etc. Remember, our parents are all sinners and broken people.
2. Unaddressed wounds of parents' childhood. Your childhood impacts what you do as a parent. Most of us in regard to our own childhood wounds, have made a vow, "I will never allow my children to suffer the way I did." This is actually noble and honorable and kind. Can you allow yourself to hear how broken that is? In my case, I am working to heal myself while I am parenting my children. It's beautiful but broken. What are the themes that have resulted from the way you've been parented? Knowing where we are from, indeed helps us know where we are meant to go. This is why capturing where we are from is so important.
3. Over-addressed capital "T" Trauma. Trauma where there has been a very significant violation of integrity or goodness. These people have known betrayal. Powerlessness. Shame. We then have a hard time trusting others. There is no way you can keep your children (in this world) from being sexually harmed. You want to look at your own idolatry and anger in how things play out with your children. Underneath our rage at our children is almost always SHAME. And then we just SHAME our SHAME.
Where are you triggered by each of your children? They are replicating something of the trauma history (small or large T trauma) that comes from our own story, often unaddressed. Unaddressed triggers inevitably move toward resentment. Every child is learning through testing. A shame-based parent is almost a self-righteous parent.
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